The latest version of the iOS Pebble app finally hit the AppStore Monday, implementing changes that were announced last week in an online announcement by Pebble. The Pebble Smartwatch app hit version 1.3.0 and adds support for additional app notifications in iOS 7. Previously, notifications were limited to mainly email, text messages, and Caller ID. Now, the device can display notifications from just about any app including Twitter, FaceBook, Instagram, etc. The update also improves on a number of features, such as Caller ID, which would typically just show the caller’s number even though it was supposed to grab names from your Contacts. Watch apps that pull information from the web to display information such as weather, stock information, and the like, are supposed to work better as well. And of course, several bugs were squashed such as the watch continuing to vibrate even when you picked up on the call it was notifying you about. Determining which apps send notifications to your watch is managed by iOS 7′s Notification Center. The new app will show you instructions on how to do this once you’ve updated the watch’s firmware. These features are supported in iOS 7 for the iPhone 4S and higher.

Without any kind of fanfare, or even a spooky little girl to tip us off, Apple snuck the new Retina iPad mini into the online store shortly after midnight PST. No sign of even the store being down as I alluded to earlier. It remains to be seen whether the devices actually hit retail shelves when the stores open later today, but you can certainly order one, with the longest wait times listed as 5-10 days. Currently if you select the Personal Pickup option, it looks like none of the stores have availability, but they may just be because it won’t show until opening hours.

With the release of the iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, and the iPad Air out of the way, people can focus on the next big thing; the new iPad mini. Many sources have been suggesting a November 21st release for the smaller tablet or a possible delay of another week to hit the stores on Black Friday, but now some info has come to light that may suggest that we will see our new little friend tomorrow morning. Yes, that’s right, TOMORROW MORNING! Earlier today, MacRumors posted an image of a tweet from user @puntomacrd which showed the date November 12, 2013 for the new iPad mini’s debut on Apple’s own service provider web portal. (more…)

Early on Thursday, Apple released Mail Update for Mavericks 1.0 and iBooks Update 1.0.1. iBook got the usual “security and stability improvements”, which isn’t much, but it did add a .1 to the version number. Mail, on the other hand, only inched from version 7.0 build (1816) to 7.0 build (1822). While the number treatment makes this seem like a minor patch to Mail, it will probably be a big deal to anyone who has been wrestling with Mavericks’ Mail program and their Gmail accounts.

Wednesday morning, via streaming video, Pebble’s CEO Eric Migicovsky opened up the presentation with an overview of the upcoming additions to the Pebble smart-watch’s capabilities which will be unlocked with the release of the Pebble SDK (Software Development Kit) version 2.0. You can read the main points from his introduction on the Pebble Blog, which also includes numbers on Pebble sales as well as active app developers. The majority of the remaining announcement was aimed purely at developers, and talked extensively about the programming details of the new SDK. If you missed it, you can watch a video recording of the entire announcement on Pebble’s channel over at YouTube.

According to MacRumors, Apple is rolling out a repair policy for iPhone 5S and 5C display replacements and other repairs, where they will be done within the store’s own repair facilities, rather than replacing the entire phone. This is part of a move by Apple to reduce repair costs on new iPhones. This may reduce costs for Apple, but not so much for iPhone owners. Currently, without an AppleCare plan for your iPhone, you can get the screen replaced for $150. With AppleCare, a replacement will run you $80. (more…)

If you read yesterday’s post, I wrote about Safari’s new Push Notifications in Mavericks, and promised some news about a service that helps you use this feature while all those web sites toil to get it implemented. The name of the service is ProntoPush, and what it does is pretty simple. You create an account, add the RSS feeds of the sites you want notifications from, and next thing you know it you’ll be receiving updates from those sites in Notification Center.

It appears that some people, after updating to Mavericks, are no longer able to boot from their BootCamp partition. The reports vary, some people update and don’t experience any problems, but some are finding that the entire partition has disappeared. There are a number of threads about this on Apple’s discussion pages. Here are a few:

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Nothing too exciting here. This seems to be a minor update to Apple’s signature music software. Where version 11.1.2 brought Mavericks compatibility, support for Arabic and Hebrew, and moved all your digital books into the new iBooks app, this update brings the following:

Resolves an issue where the equalizer may not
work as expected and improves performance when switching views in
large iTunes libraries.

This update also
includes additional minor bug fixes.

Improves
performance and stability.

You can get the update by going to Apple’s downloads page, or it should be ready and waiting for you the next time you launch the App Store app.

We all know about Notification Center in OS X, one of the many iOS like features that has crossed over to the desktop, but what are Safari Push Notifications? While it was mentioned in the Mavericks keynote, it hasn’t received too much fanfare or attention, probably because hardly anybody is using it yet, and by “anybody” I mean web sites. If you’ve been utilizing notifications on the Mac, this new addition won’t seem too radical, but if you’re like me, it may make Notification Center more useful. (more…)